Hundreds if not thousands of hours of State Department employees’ work have been spent addressing Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Paid for by taxpayers, the manpower was directed towards addressing operational failures and security threats. Government resources were also directed towards obstructing requests for the release of records via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submissions.
Ordered by a judge to release internal correspondences following refusals to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from Judicial Watch, it is now known that the State Department gave special accommodations to Clinton in violation of its own policies and federal law.
Despite knowing that Clinton’s unauthorized email system was unsecured, likely hacked, and escaping governmental capture in accordance with the law, the State Department gave special accommodations to the former first lady.
“The new Hillary Clinton email records show she had zero interest in disclosing her emails to the public as the law requires,” concluded Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.
The State Department spent time across a span of approximately two years between 2010 and 2012 addressing operational issues regarding failed reception of Clinton’s emails to agency email accounts. Emails being sent by Clinton from her personal email account to State Department colleagues were being blocked by governmental spam filters.
Justin Cooper – a loyalist of the Clintons’ and non-departmental technical assistant for the Clinton email system – shut down Clinton’s private email server on January 9, 2011 due to fears of outside hacking attempts. He wrote at the time, “someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to.” Later that day, he wrote, “We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.” The next day, the State Department’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations advised Clinton’s top agency aides not to email “anything sensitive.”
Clinton never used an authorized governmental email account with a state.gov extension, despite being advised to do so in November 2011 – nearly three years after assuming the reins of the State Department – by her own Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations.
“Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” wrote Clinton in response to the recommendation that she begin using an authorized government email system subject to FOIA requests.
Bryan Pagliano on September 10, 2015.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment over 125 times over the course of a 90-minute deposition with Judicial Watch on Wednesday, Clinton’s IT specialist Bryan Pagliano “was working off an index card and read the same crafted statement each time.”
Pagliano was the main architect of the Clinton email system. Seeking to keep secret an immunity deal he struck with the Department of Justice related to the FBI’s criminal investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, he was expected to invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination. In September of 2015, he similarly refused to answer any questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment while testifying before a House panel investigation into the Islamic terrorist attack at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
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